New Rendering Engine: A Break from the Past
Feb 26, 2015
The team working on the new rendering engine for Windows 10 at Microsoft shares some of the reasons behind building a new engine and how the community is helping inform the quality and features being built

For the past two years, a mysterious online organisation has been setting the world’s finest code-breakers a series of seemingly unsolveable problems. But to what end? Welcome to the world of Cicada 3301

cryptographer

digital steganography: the concealment of secret information within a digital file. Most often seen in conjunction with image files, a recipient who can work out the code – for example, to alter the colour of every 100th pixel – can retrieve an entirely different image from the randomised background “noise”.

the cyberpunk writer William Gibson – specifically his 1992 poem “Agrippa” (a book of the dead), infamous for the fact that it was only published on a 3.5in floppy disk, and was programmed to erase itself after being read once.

Alternate Reality Game (ARG)
Microsoft, for example, had enjoyed huge success with their critically acclaimed “I Love Bees” ARG campaign. Designed to promote the Xbox game Halo 2 in 2004, it used random payphones worldwide to broadcast a War of the Worlds-style radio drama that players would have to solve.

Imagine a world where a computer tells you what to do and when—without having to log into your PC.
The Wall Street Journal talks with Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt on the technology of tomorrow.